What is this new (?) Less Wrong feature? (“hidden related question”)

Alas – looks like I ac­ci­den­tally made what was sup­posed to be a hid­den, in­ter­nal-use-only field pub­li­cly ac­cessible. (Upon re­flec­tion I’m ac­tu­ally sort of okay with users hav­ing the abil­ity to tog­gle the flag, but if we were go­ing to go down that route ob­vi­ously I’d want to make it much more clear what it does, and build bet­ter UI for con­trol­ling it).

Over the past few weeks we’ve been quietly rol­ling out and tri­al­ing the Re­lated Ques­tions fea­ture. It’s been pub­li­cly available but we haven’t an­nounced it and mostly it’s be­ing used by mem­bers of the LessWrong team as we at­tempt to an­swer some com­plex ques­tions, to ver­ify that the Ques­tions fea­ture can be used the way we’re hop­ing.

The ba­sic idea is this: when an­swer­ing a hard ques­tion, the first step is of­ten to fac­tor it into eas­ier sub-ques­tions – some­times lots of sub­ques­tions, which helps you to frame your think­ing about the prob­lem. We want it to be easy to spawn 20 sub­ques­tions to a prob­lem. But we don’t want those 20 ques­tions to show up on the front­page as posts.

So, ques­tions cre­ated through the “Re­lated Ques­tion” UI el­e­ment have their “hid­denRe­lat­edQues­tion” flag set to “true”, which makes them not show up in pri­mary post lists. (They still show up on the User’s pro­file page, in Re­cent Dis­cus­sion, and on the /​ques­tions page).

We re­cently rol­led out some UI im­prove­ments to Re­lated Ques­tions to make it eas­ier to see how sub-ques­tions and sub-sub-ques­tions will look. You can get a sense of it look­ing at less­es­t­wrong, our “beta” site where we some­times test things out.

We have plans to make “hid­denRe­lat­edQues­tions” got tog­gled back to false in some cir­cum­stances (such as, the ques­tion get­ting highly up­voted). I think it’s ac­tu­ally fine for users to man­u­ally set some of their re­lated ques­tions to show up on the front­page, as long as it’s an in­ten­tional choice and they don’t spam it.

But, ob­vi­ously, that field should not show up in it’s cur­rent form, apolo­gies for the weird ex­tra field in your ed­i­tor form. Will fix that soon.